Montreal documentary filmmaker Carlos Ferrand travelled the world to understand the meaning - and popularity - of the ancient Indian practice of yoga. Is it simply physical exercise? Is it a spiritual quest? Or both? At first skeptical, Ferrand interviewed teachers and students in North America, France and India to get their point of view - and eventually became hooked himself. The journey became a 90-minute film, Planet Yoga.
Ferrand narrates throughout, in French or in English, depending on which version you see. With his Peruvian accent, the director's firstperson approach makes the investigation sound all the more personal. But that personality is also the film's flaw, for in suspending his disbelief over yoga's value, Ferrand asks that his audience suspend theirs as well. Skeptics, beware. The film doesn't really confront the question of whether yoga might be more a hollow fad than a liberating panacea.
What floats around uncomfortably instead is a sort of narcissism, filtered through facile New Age talk of the need to be in harmony with one's surroundings. "The more we understand the self," says a teacher in California, "the more we understand our connection to everything - everything is a part of one thing." Well-meaning, certainly, but if the path to enlightenment is all about "me," why bother to involve other people?
That said, there's a gentleness and generosity to Ferrand's documentary that's inspiring - for example, in the renewed hope that one of his subjects, Dr. Madan Bali, an octogenarian guru in Montreal, gives to his class of breast-cancer survivors. You wouldn't expect practitioners of yoga to aggressively "push" their "product," so sure enough, the more crassly commercial varieties (yoga for dogs, anyone?) get softpedalled in the film.
It would have been more dramatic, I suppose, if Ferrand had grown disenchanted with the yoga movement and done what young German filmmaker David Sieveking did last year in David Wants to Fly, a similarly themed, point-of-view exposé of transcendental meditation. Then again, Ferrand has less of an ear for irony and hypocrisy and more an eye for beauty and wonder, like the colourful flower graphics he uses to punctuate scenes.